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Readers demand to know: Why cite the forecasts of the Congressional Budget Office about the long-term outlook for debt and deficits when that agency gets things wrong so often? And doesn't the recent dispute over the Rogoff-Reinhart findings about the effect of debt on growth shed doubt on whether the long-term debt really is a problem?

Herewith are answers to these and related questions about debt and deficits.

The wobbliness of the CBO's forecasts was recently exemplified when it declared in its May projections that the projections released in February had overestimated the deficit for the current fiscal year by a whopping $200 billion. If the agency could perform that much of a flip-flop in so short a time about the current year's outlook, what does that tell us about the reliability of its long-term projections?

Answer: The CBO projections over the long term should be treated not as forecasts, but as scenarios plausible enough to be taken seriously. The agency has been telling us that the budgetary ship of state could hit an iceberg, not that it inevitably will. And that warning comes from an organization that is Keynesian in its traditions. We know the CBO is Keynesian because it tends to put outsize weight on the positive effects on economic growth of a ballooning deficit and the negative effects of a shrinking deficit. So when this agency warns that accumulated deficits could lead to a ratio of debt to gross domestic product that poses dangers to the economy, attention should be paid.

When I reported in this column last week that, based on its most realistic projection (its "alternative fiscal scenario"), the CBO projected an 83% debt/GDP ratio by 2023, this meant only that the ratio could continue to climb from its current 75%. And when I reported in February that the same ratio could climb toward 200% over the following two decades, that was based on CBO projections that are keyed off the demographically driven explosion in entitlement spending on retiring baby boomers.

When the CBO updates those scary projections (probably next month), we must note that whatever it comes up with would look even worse if it did not come from Keynesian analysts. That's because it develops its GDP forecasts without assuming that the soaring debt just might conceivably retard growth in GDP. If the agency did make that more realistic assumption, the debt/GDP ratio would climb toward 200% even faster.

Which brings us to why the recent dispute over the findings of economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart turns out to be a red herring. Their research into the negative effects on growth from burdensome debt was keyed to a debt/GDP-threshold of 90%. But whether or not the 90% thesis holds is beside the point; the CBO projections of easily double that 90% are of a quite different order of magnitude.

Finally, readers ask, If 83% is the most plausible danger over the next decade, why be so concerned about the need to act now? There are several good answers to this, but the most straightforward is this: We are talking about the risk that the federal government will be forced to pull back on entitlement spending for the elderly. You cannot suddenly tell 70-year-olds that they must adjust their lives to a radically different set of benefits. But 45-year-olds are a different matter.